Beta books are a great idea. Why don’t more technical publishers (or even publishers of any work of non-fiction) do this?
Take the Pragmatic Programmers, Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, and their publishing company, the Pragmatic Bookshelf. Dave’s currently working on the third edition of Programming Ruby, updated for Ruby 1.9. The finished product will be in the shops a few months from now.
Nothing unusual about that, you might say, but rather unconventionally, the book is already available for sale. How is that possible?
Firstly, the Pragmatic Programmers have taken the entirely logical step of selling PDF copies of their books. If you buy the paper + PDF bundle, you get them for less than the sum of the two. A PDF of a technical book is a grand thing, because it’s a lot easier to use a computer to search a file than it is to use one’s fingers and eyes to search a stack of paper.
PDFs are also cheap to produce and not just user-friendly, but environmentally friendly, too. Extending the idea, why not produce PDFs of books that aren’t quite ready yet. Offer them to your readers and, as with a piece of beta software, you’ll get errata reports back. Reader feedback is important to an author, so why not get that feedback while you write the book, instead of after it’s published, by which point it’s only useful for the next edition, which is almost certainly a few years away. And that edition will have its own problems, too.
So, I already have my copy of the third edition of Programming Ruby and am happily using it. Whenever the manuscript is updated, I get an e-mail, which allows me to go to the Web site of the Pragmatic Programmers and regenerate the PDF for myself.
I think PDFs of technical books make perfect sense. Beta PDFs of not yet finished books make even more sense, if you can improve on perfect.